IN DEPTH BlendOS

Matt Holder discovers how to use the Arch-based BendOS to mash together multiple distributions. Does it give the best of them all?

W hat if you could mix the friendliness of Ubuntu, the cutting edge of Arch and the stability of Fedora? Would that be the ultimate distro? Welcome to BlendOS! This is an Arch-based distribution that contains many modern features and allows for applications to be run from three different distros (Ubuntu, Fedora and Arch). It sounded so interesting we decided to have an in-depth look, get you up and running and interview the project’s founding developer.

Let’s begin with a discussion about Arch. When we started using Linux, there was a mantra along the lines of: if you want to use a different operating system, use Linux, and if you want to learn about the depths of Linux, use Arch. Arch now provides a text-based installer tool that walks new users through the installation process. This is by no means as userfriendly as something like the Ubuntu installer, but it’s a lot simpler than the traditional option, which is to carry out every stage manually using the relevant commandline tools. For example, to set the correct keyboard layout, you would need to run ls /usr/share/kbd/ keymaps/*/*.map.gz , which lists the names of the keyboard mapping files. The next command to run sets the layout, which needs to be as follows loadkeys de-latin1 . Some other steps that then need to be carried out involve configuring the Ethernet or Wi-Fi connection, partitioning the disk, copying files, using chroot to invoke commands on the new installation, setting the root password, adding a user and installing the bootloader. This can be incredibly daunting, but it’s a very powerful way of learning what is involved and how the jigsaw pieces all fit together to end up with a working distribution.

Arch is renowned for having access to bleedingedge software. The pace of software updates is so great that it isn’t recommended to wait too long between upgrades, because if lots of packages change version, it can cause stability issues.

Around the blend

Now to BlendOS. It features a read-only or immutable root filesystem. This has been accomplished in an interesting way, with filesystem overlays available to install packages. These are mounted transparently on top of the root filesystem and the distribution sees the files as all being on the same filesystem. A subsequent boot allows for the overlay to be merged to the root filesystem, should this be required. As described when discussing other immutable operating systems, it is important to keep the root filesystem as standard as possible, so that extra security concerns are not added to the base operating system. Due to the sheer pace of change and reduced testing time, the base of Arch won’t necessarily be as stable as something like Ubuntu or OpenSUSE’s MicroOS.